America unprepared for aging population, expert says in Buck talk

The United States needs to prepare now for the aging of American society, an expert on aging told more than 250 people gathered June 14 at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato.

In 24 months, the proportion of American citizens over the age of 60 will be larger than the portion under age 15, said Dr. John Rowe, one of the founding directors of the institute and the former chief executive of Aetna Inc.

"Imagine a society with more walkers than strollers. That's an aging society," Rowe said. "And we are woefully unprepared for this. The core institutions of our society were not designed to support a population with the age distribution that we are going to have.

"The gap between haves and have nots is widening and it could widen very substantially if we don't fix our society."

In 2007, a Marin County Civil Grand Jury report warned that Marin was unprepared for a "silver tsunami." The report noted that by 2030 one of every three Marin residents would be 65 or older.

The Buck Institute regularly hosts lectures on topics related to aging, which are open to the general public. The lectures help educate the public about the institute's mission and attract donors.

Mary McEachron, the institute's acting chief operating officer, said Rowe played a key role in the creation of the Buck Institute, testifying in 1984 before a Marin Superior Court judge about the feasibility of a Marin research institute focusing on age-related illnesses. At the time, a legal battle was being waged over whether Marin Community Foundation funds could be spent outside of Marin County.

Rowe served as chief executive of Mount Sinai New York University Health before joining Aetna, and before that was the founding director of the Division of Aging at the Harvard Medical School as well as chief of gerontology at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital.

He began to investigate the effects of longer life spans on society when he agreed to lead the MacArthur Foundation's Network on An Aging Society after retiring from Aetna in 2000.

Rowe said one of the first things the network's members, a dozen scholars from the United States and Europe, did was cast a critical eye on life expectancy projections generated by the Social Security Administration and the Census Bureau.

"They have both been making the assumption that the incremental increase in life expectancy is going to be progressively smaller and smaller," Rowe said.

The Network on An Aging Society has generated a different set of numbers based on the possibility that there will be advancement in the treatment of deadly diseases associated with age, such as cancer and Alzheimer's, or that science may find a way of slowing the rate at which people age, making them less susceptible to age-related diseases.

While the Social Security Administration is predicting there will be about 7 million people age 85 or older by 2030, the network foresees the possibility that there will be 10 or 12 million people 85 or older in 20 years.

That larger projection assumes advancements in treating illness only. If a method of slowing the rate of aging is perfected, the number of people 85 and older will skyrocket, Rowe said.

A more accurate estimate of life expectancy is just one of the adjustments needed to prepare society for aging of the population, Rowe said. The network has also taken pains to challenge a number of myths that obscure the truth about the aging society.

Rowe reviewed some of the most common, including that the aging of the United States is a temporary phenomenon caused by the baby boom generation. While the aging of baby boomers is accelerating the aging of American society, it is not responsible, Rowe said.

Another myth is that debilitating illness is a product of aging, he said. Data show that people with a college degree or more education avoid such illness much longer than people with less education, Rowe said.

Another myth, Rowe said, is that the key group in an aging society is the elderly. He said as the population in Europe has aged it is the young who have been affected most due to cuts in education. This fact points to two more popular myths: that policy makers must inevitably choose between policies that benefit the young and the elderly, and that intergenerational political warfare is inevitable.

Rowe said that when a pension was provided to grandmothers in South Africa, the women's granddaughters grew taller and the girls' education improved. He cited this as an example of a policy that benefited both generations simultaneously.